


the wreckage of a universe

by transtlanticism



Category: Project Nemesis Series - Brendan Reichs
Genre: F/M, it's technically canon compliant now, its more platonic mintack than anything, this isnt even really mintack, which is a self BETRAYAL but
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-17
Updated: 2019-04-17
Packaged: 2020-01-15 16:24:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18502654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/transtlanticism/pseuds/transtlanticism
Summary: Post-Chrysalis (before the final resurrection). Tack tries to figure out a way to support Min while she deals with Noah's loss.





	the wreckage of a universe

I go to see her on one of the better days. She’s actually out of bed, wreathed in a heavy sweater despite the warm morning. Her hair hangs raggedly down her back, and I have an unpleasant vision of her in about sixty years or so, frail and shaky. 

It’s shocking to think we’ll live that long. I’m used to thinking I won’t survive the night by this point. 

“Morning,” I say, and she nods. “Casey made coffee, do you want any?”

It’s not a real question. I’m holding two cups. She slides into a chair at her tiny, splintered table and I set the cup in front of her. Her hands wind around the cup, as if soaking in its warmth. (It’s at least seventy degrees. Then again, she is always cold.)

Min is…a mess. It’s been two months. I only stop by when she’s okay with it, even though I live close. I miss our old equilibrium, where I could stroll in unannounced in typical Tack Russo fashion, but she’s especially delicate these days, and sometimes I think I’m the only thing tethering her to the planet.

I thought it scared me when she fell in love with Noah, but it scares me more to see her so deadened over his loss. 

If I’m being honest, I feel guilty. I couldn’t breathe or walk, let alone tackle Sophia, but I was there. I let him sacrifice himself. I pulled Min back to the airlock and shoved her up the ladder. 

Noah told me to _help her_. 

I only wish I knew how. 

She finishes the coffee, and I can see her waking up a little, but the hollow expression doesn’t leave her gray eyes. She leaves to take a shower, and I straighten the sheets on her bed and clean up the coffee mugs. There are clothes on her floor, so I pick those up and fold them, too. I can’t fix Min, but I can at least make sure her cabin is habitable. Sun streams weakly through the thin curtain over her window, so I pull it back and let light flood the room. 

I know Min is shattered. I also know it isn’t only Noah. 

It’s every kid in our class that died. It’s everyone she feels responsible for. The guilt that she survived and they didn’t eats at her every day. It’s the Nemesis Three kids she bested in Sophia’s twisted games. It’s her father, who died to save her. It’s her mother, who did all she could. It’s everyone responsible for Project Nemesis. It’s the whole world, all laid to rest over a million years ago. 

Sometimes the fact that we can’t ever go back hits me all over again, and it feels like my lungs are closing in. 

It seemed like a good idea at the time, but I feel like crap for ditching Min and leaving Home Town. Even though I needed the space, I can’t help but feel a little responsible for the fact that she had to lean entirely on Noah. And now he’s dead, and she’s still not super good at leaning on me. 

Maybe she doesn’t completely trust me anymore, and I feel responsible for that, too. 

God, I miss our little trailer park. Our scenic mountain town. The shit we used to get into as kids. But Min is here, and she’s alive. We’ve both changed as people, but I’d rather have a twisted, broken Min than no Min at all. 

I did my time without her. I missed my best friend. I won’t lose her again. Even if I have to cling to her with all of my strength, I won’t let the darkness take her. 

…

When we were eleven, we both went on that class trip to Walla Walla. We took a seat near the front, since Ethan and Toby were whooping up a storm in the back of the bus. The designated “popular” girls sat in the middle, expressions bored as they scrolled through their phones the entire ride. 

There were two buses, assigned alphabetically, and luckily my last name was close to Min’s, with only six people between us. Mary Roke stood on my other side, wide smile glittering in the bright sun. I was friendly with her, the two of us accustomed to exchanging snide comments under our breaths during assemblies when we had to sit in alphabetical order. When she died, Hector and I left her seat between us open for two months before I finally shifted over. 

He never made snide comments.  

(He still doesn’t, and the kid has every reason in the world to, after all the bullshit we’ve been through. If someone told me that he was an actual saint, I wouldn’t even question it. Hector was the one who always dropped by to see Min in her most catatonic phase, making her food and staying to see her eat it. Despite everything, he’s still the kindest person I’ve ever met.)

But when we were still standing in that line to get on the bus, Hector was a gawky child who was always anxiously tugging at the cross around his neck. Mary stood between us, a half-smile on her square-jawed face, her wispy gold hair blowing in the breeze. She filed onto the bus after Hector and dropped into the seat directly behind the driver. 

I hesitated before taking a seat three rows back, directly over the front right tire. I watched faces pass. Kharisma Rutherford. Dakota Sargent. Rachel Stein. Aiken Talbot. Emma Vogel. Finn Whittaker. And there was Min, her hair in a braid over her shoulder. She tucked her long bangs behind her ear and slid in next to me, kicking her backpack under the seat. 

“What are we gonna do for four hours?” she asked. “I don’t think Chopsticks is going to pass the time.”

She was referencing our favorite game to play when we had nothing to do, an addition game where the objective was to knock your partner out of the game by equating the number of fingers they were holding up to five. “It might,” I said. “If nothing else, it will distract us from the…”

“Mundanity?” Her lips twitched. I didn’t even know what _mundanity_ meant. 

“Uh huh.”

“Fine.” She shrugged off her jacket and extended her index fingers. “Ready? One plus one.”

…

When she comes back from the shower, her hair is in a braid over her shoulder, and an ache rises in my throat. It’s all too familiar. 

Almost every face on that bus is dead now. 

_Mary. Kharisma. Dakota. Aiken. Emma. Finn._

I saw Rachel this morning, but she’s not my favorite person. So. 

If I could tell the two kids on that bus, fresh into middle school and holding onto each other with every ounce of strength they had, what was coming next…I would tell them to keep holding onto each other, even when it got hard. Because the alternative was so much worse. 

“Hey,” I say. “What do you want to do today?”

She shrugs, and I can see the weight settling in to take root. “Check on the garden,” she says. “That’s about all I’ve got planned for the next…rest of my life.”

It’s such a system shock to see my fierce best friend so ripped to shreds. It’s infuriating that this is what the world has done to her, to us. 

“Then we need to make some new plans,” I say. “Sit down.”

She tugs at the end of her braid. “Tack—” 

“Come on.” I kick out a chair for her to sit in. “We’ve got the rest of our lives to, uh, wait out the…what was the word you used? The _mundanity_?" 

“Walla Walla.” She almost snorts. “You want to play Chopsticks?”

“If it’ll pass the time.”

Something shifts behind her eyes. “You’re insane.”

“Humor me.”

She shakes her head and drops down into the seat, resting her index fingers at the table. “You go first.”

I tap her left index finger. “One,” I say. 

She adds one and reaches out her left hand to tap my right hand. “Two.”

We kill fifteen minutes before she gets up and wanders outside. It’s not four hours, but it’s not nothing. 

… 

“Thomas,” she said one morning, hands on her hips and glaring at me with those stony eyes of hers. “What the hell happened to you yesterday? I waited for you, and you never showed.”

I slouched in my seat. “Long story.” 

She fiddled with her ponytail. “Tell me.”

“It’s nothing, really.”

“If it was worth not showing up, it’s worth telling me.” She checked my face for bruises. I wished she wouldn’t. “Was it your dad?”

A loud whistle sounded from across the room, and I looked up to see a familiar face in the doorway. Ethan fired two finger guns at me. “Hey, Thumbtack! You were looking really…sharp yesterday.”

The pun was weak at best, but a surge of anger flooded through me, and only Min’s warning look stopped me from saying something dumb. Satisfied with my silence, Ethan ambled from the room to smothered giggles from the Nolan twins behind me. And everyone else who followed Ethan’s Instagram account. 

Min, however, did not. “What did he mean by Thumbtack?” she hissed. “What did he do to you?”

“Nothing,” I snapped. 

“What, didn’t you hear, Melinda?” Chris Nolan snaked his way around the table, long red hair hanging in his face. “We did an art project yesterday, starring your friend……Tack.”

Min stood up. “I am very close to punching you in the face,” she said calmly. “What. Did. You. Do. With. Thomas?”

He sneered at her. “Nothing you need to worry about.”

She pulled her hand back, but I seized her wrist before she could strike. “Jesus, Min! Don’t get suspended over this. It’s nothing.”

But it was eating at me, and I knew she could tell. She glared at Chris one last time before focusing her attention on me. “So? What did he do?”

I sighed. Quietly told her. 

By the time I finished, her eyes were bugging out of her head. She pushed her chair back, and I grabbed her arm again, determined not to get her suspended for taking on both Nolan twins and Ethan at once. “Min, no.” 

“I’ll kill them,” she said, her face a mask of fury. “I will.”

“They’d kill you first.”

She arched an eyebrow at me, and I let it slide. Huffing, she sat back down in their seat. “Fine. How are we going to get back at them?”

I squinted at her. “In no way that’s going to get you in trouble."  

“Forget that,” she said dismissively. “You know I’d get suspended for you. But, fine, here’s a plan: you just need to show them that this doesn’t affect you at all. That would bug them the most.”

“How do I do that?”

She shrugged. “What would piss them off?”

That’s when I got an idea. “What if I got everyone to call me Thumbtack? Or just Tack? And wouldn’t respond to any other name?"  

She laughed. “For how long?”

“As long as it takes to get them really annoyed.”

She gave me a conspiratorial grin. “I’m in,” she said. “ _Tack_.”

… 

We both had nicknames, then, and I kinda partially kept the name because I loved the way she said it. Plus, it represented my personality well. 

It just…stuck, and I can still hear the annoyance in Ethan’s voice when he addresses me, which is all I really wanted out of this. 

Ethan isn’t nearly so much of a dick these days. I’m not sorry we set his car on fire. I tell him so one night after eating dinner in the mess with the rest of the group. (Min was asleep by then, and I figured I’d let her rest.)

“I _knew_ it was you,” he says, but there’s no heat in his voice. “No one believed me, but I knew it.”

“Well, it was Min, really. I was just accessory to arson.”

“I would have strangled her,” Ethan mutters. “Oh, well. The thing would have burned up one week later with the rest of the world, anyway.”

“You still owe me a few apologies,” I point out under my breath. 

He socks me in the shoulder. “Not a chance. _Thomas_."  

It feels like an olive branch, so I take it. We’re all stuck here on the same planet. I might as well make my peace where I can.  

… 

I can’t help but think about the day Min cut her hair. It was just before her fourteenth birthday—she’d been keeping it just above shoulder-length, but Virginia was always pressing her to cut it, so she did. 

 She looked seriously badass. It gave the coldness of her eyes an extra dimension. Her nickname was less little-girl-hates-her-full-name and more rebel-only-needs-three-letters-to-strike-fear-into-enemy-hearts. 

Her demeanor was always different around her birthdays, too, so after mid-September passed she came back one morning with a vengeance that made even Sarah Harden tread lightly around her. She shut locker doors with more force, strode through the hallways with heavy footsteps, wrote her name with darker handwriting. 

She even tried a little eyeliner that year. I thought she looked beautiful, but Jessica, Kristen, and Tiffani mocked her once and she never wore it again.  

I didn’t know what exactly happened on her birthdays, but after her fourteenth, she knocked on the door to my trailer at almost midnight. My father, luckily, was passed out drunk, so I let Min in, shocked to see tears on her face. We shut ourselves in my room and I held her while she sobbed.  

She never told me why. (I asked. A few times. Upwards of twenty.) I eventually chalked it up to overwhelming stress, and maybe Virginia getting on her nerves.  

She stayed there with me all night, crying until she was too exhausted to stay awake any longer and she fell asleep on my ratty carpet. I put a pillow under her head and lay down next to her. 

We didn’t go to school the next day. It was Friday, so we walked out to the woods and sat in a sunlit clearing and methodically worked our way through a pack of Twizzlers and a bag of potato chips. She laughed at a joke I made, and her short, dark hair fell in her eyes, and I tried really hard not to fall in love with her. 

I don’t think anyone can be close to Min Wilder and not fall a little bit in love with her.  

…

She spends a lot of time on her back porch, watching the moons circulating in the sky, and every cup of tea she drinks brings her closer to her old self. 

There’s still something off, though, and I can trace the unfamiliarity back to her vacant stare, eyes the color of the sky when it can’t decide whether to storm or to stay silent. She always stays silent. 

Until the day she decides to storm. 

She marches into my cabin one afternoon, and I set down Anna’s dog novella. (I never got a chance to read it the first time around, and it reads exactly like one of Min’s favorite books.) “Hey,” I say warily. “Everything okay?” She’s never been to my cabin before.

“Scissors,” she says abruptly. “Do you have any?”

I stand up. “No, but Rose might. Why? What do you need them for?”

She turns and strides out.

“Wait! Min!” 

I catch her as she swings a leg over my ATV, parked out front. The walk to Livingston Colony is, like, ten minutes, but I guess she wants to get over there quickly. “I’m coming with you,” I say. I don’t know what she’s doing, but I feel like I need to keep an eye on her. 

She doesn’t protest, gunning the engine. I leap onto the seat and hang onto her waist as she tears away. 

The ATVs were Chrysalis rescues. I couldn’t believe how much survived when the station crashed, and, incredibly, the supply of tractors created a barrier that kept the ATVs from being destroyed. Everyone still avoids technology like the plague, so I made off with one of them. No one protested. The trek between my cabin and Livingston Colony is a hike, and I prefer driving when possible. 

Min, however, hasn’t been to the colony in a while. I’m not shocked when she doesn’t drive the thing directly into the cabin circle, but rather skirts the area until we’re directly outside Rose’s cabin. Her long hair blows in my face and I have to duck to stay away from it.

Rose pokes her head out from the door, face pinched. “What the hell is with the racket, Thomas?”

Min climbs off the ATV and steps into Rose’s line of sight. “Hi,” she says flatly. 

Rose blanches. “Min."  

Dead silence. My gaze slides between the two of them. Now that we’re actually here, Min doesn’t seem to know what to say. 

Luckily, I do. I slide off the ATV. “You got a pair of scissors?”

Min snaps out of it and glances over at me, ear-tucking her hair. It’s looking especially frazzled, as if she’s been messing with the ends. “Sorry. Yeah. I need them. Do you have any?” 

Rose gives Min a long look, then nods, disappearing inside without a word. The door slams behind her. Min stares at the outer wall. 

Finally, I’ve had enough of the cryptic mission. “Melinda—”

The door swings open and Rose emerges, a weathered pair of scissors in hand. She passes them to Min. “You can bring them back whenever,” she says. “I don’t need them anytime soon.” 

“Thanks.” Min walks back to the ATV and turns on the engine. Rose shakes her head and retreats back inside her cabin.  

“Min,” I try again.

“Are you coming, or not?” She hands me the scissors. “Try not to stab me,” she adds as I climb on behind her. “That might be kind of a hassle, seeing as we have no hospital here.”

I literally don’t know how to respond, but I don’t have to, because she guns it down the path and it’s impossible to hear anything after that.

When we arrive back at her cabin, she climbs off and practically sprints inside. I follow her, unsure of what’s happening, but she’s in front of her mirror, measuring the ends of her hair. 

It hits me in a stunning wave of relief. _She’s cutting it off._

She hesitates, then turns to me. “I can’t see well enough,” she admits. “Would you do it?”

Still stunned, I nod. “Let’s go outside, in the light. How short do you want it?"  

She glances back at the mirror. “As short as it was before all of this happened.”

Just shorter than chin-length, then.

She leans back on her hands and I watch her dark hair fall to the grass as I close Rose’s scissors over the strands. She closes her eyes against the sun, and I can almost feel it spinning backward, reversing time for us. 

I know can’t go back to how it was before.

_Can we?_

…

Our phones were always low on battery from all the pictures we took. We learned to share them with each other in blinks. When Snapchat first released, we were on it instantly, long before it got popular. We were in constant communication, and that was the way we liked it. 

At fourteen years old, Min and I could practically read each other’s minds. We were the personification of finishing each other’s sentences. I’d get asked a question, she would have the answer, and vice-versa. She’d speak my mind before I could even articulate what I wanted to say. There was always something dark lurking just out of reach in both of us, but on the surface, we were practically a hive mind.  

My father and her mother both had vast CD collections. Min and I used to spend hours lying on the floor of her trailer with a CD player, just putting in disc after disc and listening intently. She didn’t always love sitting there for hours, but she loved me, so she listened to endless music for me and I read endless books for her.  

We had similar childhoods in that way. When we were old enough for digital music libraries, we shared our playlists on early morning bus rides, sharing earbuds with our heads close together, her hair always swinging in my face and smelling vaguely of nutmeg. She would tap her sneaker against the floor to the beat and sometimes whisper the words under her breath.

Freshman year was easy because we had every class together, and we would swap notes and assignments at lunch and during study hall. That winter was my favorite, all deadpan humor and coffee and playlists with our names on them. Everyone left us alone that year because they couldn’t pick us off individually. We were perpetually within ten feet of each other, like a binary star system, always orbiting steadily. It was in January of 2016 that I began to allow myself to believe that Min and I had some semblance of a future together. 

I couldn’t have been more wrong. But I didn’t know that then. 

“Smashing Pumpkins,” she said one afternoon, climbing onto the bus behind me. “Yea or nay?”

“Generally? Not so much,” I replied, “but it depends on the song.”

“Nirvana?”

“I’m not legally allowed to say that I don’t like Nirvana.” Plus, I was an angsty fourteen-year-old. Of course I liked Nirvana. 

She grinned at me in a way that was so different from the usual tight-lipped grimace she kept with everyone else, like I was the only person in the world she trusted with her smile. 

…

I’m absently humming one day, lying flat on my back in the sun as she kneels in her garden, when she jerks her head up at me. “What was that?"  

“What was what?”

“The song,” she says. “I know it.”

Honestly, I don’t know what the hell I was singing. We’re both tone-deaf. I can’t exactly Shazam it. Whatever it is, I haven’t heard it in years, and I can’t figure out why it’s in my head. 

Except…yeah, I can. I remember it now. God, the irony. 

“It’s Coldplay,” I tell her. “Moving to Mars.”

And that’s when she _laughs_. 

It’s totally strangled, a chuckle that escapes from the back of her throat, but it’s enough to get me to sit up. I want to run over and hug her, but I know she’d hate that, so I stay where I am. 

And she turns and smiles at me. It’s not the open grin anymore, but it’s not nothing.

I’ve almost fallen asleep in the scorching sun when I hear her softly singing. 

…

Right up until the day we died, I would have said I loved Min enough to sacrifice the world for her. 

I guess the world didn’t really give me a choice. Or maybe it was just calling my bluff. 

…

The world ended a million years ago, and I would sacrifice everything to give it all back to her if I could. 

But it’s still not up to me, so I’ll just stay with her as long as she needs me to.  

It’s been four months. She’ll be okay.  

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr: @transtlanticism  
> twitter: @bunkersilo


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